GazeHand: A Gaze-Driven Virtual Hand Interface

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel interface named GazeHand which is designed for distant object interaction in virtual reality. The GazeHand interface translates the virtual hands near to a distant object that the user is looking at and allows direct hand gesture interaction for manipulating an object. Either eyegaze or head-gaze can be applied to the GazeHand interface to decide the translated positions of the hands. In a user study, we compared these two variants of the GazeHand interface, i.e., Eye-GazeHand and Head-GazeHand, with a baseline condition of a modified Go-Go interface. The results showed that both GazeHand interfaces support the high-level usability of the direct hand operation for distant object interaction while providing the benefits of the gaze interaction: speed and reachability. The two variants of GazeHand interfaces showed better performance than the modified Go-Go interface and the effects were more prominent as the difficulty level of the task increased. The most preferred interface was the Head-GazeHand which took the benefit of a stable head-gaze, while the Eye-GazeHand was less stable using eye-gaze. Meanwhile, the Eye-GazeHand interface showed its advantage over the Head-GazeHand when the task required much gaze movement as it used faster eye-gaze without requiring head movement.INDEX TERMS Distant object interaction, pivot point, virtual hand, virtual reality.